deepkolos / materialutilities

Porting (and expanding) of MaterialUtils AddOn from Blender 2.7 to Blender 2.8

Material utilities v2.4.0 (Stable)

An add-on for Blender 2.8x that lets the user assign materials directly in the 3D viewport (via a keyboard shortcut and a pop up menu), as well as select by material and more!

Each part is tested thoroughly during development, but we can't guarantee that there in't a special case where a problem might occur!
Please read the list of Known issues below, if your problem isn't listed, please leave a bug report.

Version

The current stable version of Material Utilities is v2.4.1
(Major version indicates big changes or feature adds, Minor version bigger bugfixes and changes to existing features, Patch version [last number] indicates small changes and fixes)

Table of Contents

• Background
• Information
• Installation
• Usage
• Known issues
• Support
• Contributing
• License
• Acknowledgements

Background

This is based on the Add-on Material Utils, originally written for Blender 2.4 (and then ported to 2.5, 2.6 etc).
I was really missing this Add-on when I started using Blender 2.80. But I couldn't find any ports of it (or even any in development), so I decided to port it myself, and this is the result!

The goal is to include (almost) every feature it had in 2.7x, but I'm also adding some features that I think (and hope others will as well) will be useful!
If you're missing something, please send in a request and we'll see what we can do!

If you want to know what's different (including code wise), take a look at the Differences document.
But here are some examples:

• Some functions (like "Clean Material Slots") now also work on Curve and Surface objects
• The Select By Material have the option to extend the current selecction
• Assign Material have options to override or append materials in Object Mode

Information

This Add-on is now included with the official Blender Builds (since 2.81), just go the Preferences > Add-ons > Select the Material category, or search for "Material", and then enable it.
NB: The version included with Blender might be, slightly, older than the latest version found in this repository. Plesae visit the Changelog to compare the difference in the versions.
Thanks to Meta-Androcto for handling the inclusion into the Blender repository.

Installation

1. Download the Add-on as a ZIP-file.
2. In Blender 2.8x go to Edit > Preferences, select Add-ons in the left panel, and then Install in the upper right.
3. Browse to where you saved the ZIP-file, select it and click on Install Add-on from File.
4. Click the checkbox to the left to enable the Add-on.
5. Click the menu icon in the lower left and select Save Current State

Usage

Popup menu

The default shortcut for Material Utilities is [Shift + Q].

Tip: All operators and options have descriptive tooltips

You can set the defaults of several options, such as the default name for new materials, in the Preferences (Open Blender Preferences, go to Add-ons, find Material Utilities)

• Assign Material
  Gives you a list of all available materials (including the option to create a new material).
  Assigns the material you choose to the current selection.
  Add the top of the menu you have options to Add a new material and "Search" for a material (you can change when this appears in the preferences), which can be useful if you have a lot of materials in your project. Both of these will open the operator panel as a "dialog" in your viewport.
  In the operator the + (plus) button to the right will let you add a new material. In Object Mode you have the option to select how the existing material (slots) should be treated (In Edit mode it will append the material if it's not already in a material slot).
  

  • Override all assigned slots
    Will remove any material previously assigned to the object(s) and add the one you've chosen
  • Assign material to currently selected slot
    Sets the material you choose to only the currently active material slot (in the Material Properties panel). It will leave the rest of the materials untouched.
  • Assign material to each slot
    Keeps all the material slots, and their assignment to respective parts of the object. But will replace each material in those slots with your chosen material.
    (This is recommended when materials are linked to the object)
  • Append material
    Keeps all materials slots, but appends your chosen material (if it's not already in a slot), and assigns the whole object to that material slot.
    (This is not recommended when materials are linked to object, and there's linked duplicates of the object)

• Select by Material
  Gives you a list of all available materials (in Edit mode it only shows the materials assigned to the object).
  Selects all objects (in Object Mode) or faces (in Edit Mode) that have the material you choose.
  In the operator panel [F9] you can choose to extend your current selection, otherwise what was selected before will be unselected first.
  

• Copy Materials to Seleted

  • In Object Mode: Copies all the materials of the active object to the other selected objects.
  • In Edit Mode: Copies the material of the active face to the other selected faces (works if you have multiple objects in Edit Mode as well).
    (NB: You need to have Face Select enabled to use this)

• Clean Slots

  • Clean Material Slots
    Removes any material slots that isn't assigned to any part of the object
  • Remove Active Slot (Object Mode only)
    You can limit it to only the active object in the operator panel [F9]
  • Remove All Material Slots (Object Mode only)
    Remove all material slots (and thus materials) assigned to the selected object(s).
    You can limit it to only the active object in the operator panel [F9]

• Replace Material
  Replace any occurence of one material, Original, with another material, Replacement.
  In the operator panel you can also choose if you want it done "globally" (for all objects in the file), or just for selected objects.
  You can also choose to have the objects that were affected by the change selected (objects not affected will be deselcted).
  

• Set Fake User
  Set the Fake User flag (to preserve unused materials) of the materials to either On or Off, or Toggle (on a per material basis) their current states.
  You can limit the action to Unused materials (Default), Used materials, All materials, materials of the Selected objects, of the Active object, of the Active Collection, of a Selected Collection, or of all objects in the current Scene.
  

• Change Material Link
  Change how the material slots are linked, to either the Data (i.e. Mesh Data) or to the Object, or Toggle (on a per material basis) what they are currently are linked to.
  You can limit the action to material slots of the Selected objects (Default), of the Active object, of the Active Collection, of a Selected Collection, of all objects in the current Scene, or of All objects in the file.
  When switching to Linked to Object the materials assigned the materials assigned to the slots will be kept intact.
  When switching to Linked to Data there's a possibility that there's already an material assigned to the Mesh Data.
  If there is no material assigned to the data, the material of the object will be kept.
  If there is an material assigned to the data, that material will be used by default, or you can force the use of the material assigned to the object, by enabling Override Data Material (Do note that this will affect all objects that share the same Data and have materials linked to the Data).
  If you enable Unlink Material From Old Link the material will be "unlinked" from what it was linked to before when the linking is changed. If it was linked to before the Link change.
  

• Specials

  • Merge Base Names
    Finds materials such as Material, Material.001, Material.002 and merges them into a single material (Material).
    You can select a specific Material Base Name (such as MyMaterial) to find duplicates of (MyMaterial.001 etc).
    By enabling Auto Rename/Replace it will find all materials that are "duplicates" and merge them into a single material.
    Do note that this only keeps the base material (MyMaterial) and ignores the other versions (MyMaterial.001 etc)
    You can choose to give the material a new name after all the duplicates have been merged by "checking" the icon to the right of the material name (a box where you can enter the new name will appear).\

    • Patterns
      If you want to merge materials based on another pattern than the the default Blender way (such as Material_001 instead of Material.001) you can change the Pattern option to set a custom delimiter (eg. . _ ,) or define your own pattern with (Python style) Regular Expressions, you can use %BASE_NAME to indicate the base part of the name (or just make sure it's a group, the operator expects one group matching the base name, eg MyMaterial, and a second group matching the suffix, eg. 042)
      The default regular expression is ^%BASE_NAME\.(\d{1,3})$ which matches materials like MyMaterial.003 as well as MyMaterial.2 (The %BASE_NAME token just translates to (.*)).\

    

  • Join By Material
    This is the opposite of "Seperate By Material" in Edit mode. It finds objects that have the same material and join them together.
    You can set a specific Material, where all objects that have that material will be joined.
    Or you can choose to Automatically Join, where objects that share the same material will be joined (no matter what the material is).
    If there's different types of objects (Mesh, Curves etc) that shares the same material, those will be joined according to their type.
    Do note that if the objects have multiple materials, the resulting joins might not be as you predicted.
    Tip: If you have objects that you don't want to be affected, you can hide them from the viewport first.
    

  • Set Auto Smooth
    Enables the Auto Smooth option (otherwise found under Normals in the Object Data panel) and sets the Auto Smooth Angle to the chosen value for the selected objects (or the objects you choose to affect).
    This is useful when you want to set enable Auto Smooth or set the Auto Smooth Angle for multiple objects.
    You can choose to Set Smooth shading for the affect objects as well. Auto smooth only works on surfaces that has smooth shading, but do note that the Set Smooth will override any parts that might have been set to flat shading.
    In the preferences for the Add-on you can set your desired default angle, as well as the default options for Affect.
    

Note about Active collection limiting.

The Active collection isn't necessarily the same as the collection of the active object. Please check the outliner to verify which collection is active, or choose a specific collection to limit which objects and materials gets affected.

Material Specials menu

Material Utilities adds some options to the Material Specials menu as well (accessible by the small downward pointing arrow to the right of the materials list).
At the bottom of this menu (below Paste Material), most of the options from the popup menu (detailed above) is added. And at the top two other options are added:

• Move slot to top
  Moves the currently selected material slot to the top of the list
• Move slot to bottom
  Moves the currently selected material slot to the bottom of the list

Preferences

In the Add-on Preferences (Go to the Prefences in Blender [Edit menu] and the Add-ons section, find the Material Utilities Add-on, either by searching or selecting the Material category) you have the options to change some settings for this Add-on.
The defaults section lets you set the default options (like the default material name when adding a new material) for several of the operators that is described above.
The Show 'Search' Limit lets you choose how many materials there should be before the Search option in the Assign Material and Select By Material menus. Set it to 0 (default) to always show Search in the menus. There is also an option to have the Search (and Add new material) appear at the bottom of the menus, given a certain numbers of materials.
For those cases where your file have a lot of materials, and using the Assign Material and Select By Material is slow (or even hangs Blender), there is now an limit to the number of materials shown (Defaults to 1000 materials). (You can still access all the materials via the Search option)

Known issues

There's currently no known issues.

(Do note that each spline/curve in Curve Objects can only have one material, so you can't assign different materials to different parts of a spline)

Support

Support is given when time is available, you can ask for support via https://chris.hindefjord.se/contact/.
If you think you've find a bug, please report it by creating an issue!
Bug reports takes precedence over other support requests!

Contributing

You're welcome to contribute to this Add-on.
If you want to know where to start, take a look at the TODO file.

License

This project is licensed under the GPLv3 License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Acknowledgements

This Add-on is based on and uses (some) code by the following awesome people:
Michael Williamson (michaelw) (original author)
Meta-Androcto
Sybren
Saidenka
lijenstina
CoDEmanX
SynaGl0w
ideasman42

(If you think your code is used in this add-on, but you're not listed here, please contact ChrisHinde so correct attribution can be given)